this is evolution
by Clarice Waters
Summary: Hermione finds her purpose in the war against Voldemort. Hermionecentric.


**Disclaimer: **Harry Potter belongs to J.K Rowling. Seriously people, we all know I had nothing to do with it. It's J.K's sandbox, I'm just playing in it.

This stories title was taken from a Marilyn Manson song by the name of "Cruci-Fiction In Space."

The concept for Hermiones ability is from a Stephen King story called Everything's Eventual. Found in Kings short story compilation of the same name.

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**this is evolution _(the monkey, the man, then the gun)_**

_God knows I know, I've thrown away,_

_Those graces. _

_-_ Blood Roses, Tori Amos

Under magical lighting, the room has warmed with the strangest of angles; light rises and falls, peeks into corners and onto the Headmaster's desk, over the weary lines and fashioned concern of the five sat crescent moon behind it. Behind them portraits of HeadPeoples Passed fail at remaining silent and it seems just odd, so displaced that what she passed herself over as may about to be unraveled.

For now, she stands at the frame of the door. She doesn't even have to glance in Dumbledores direction to know where it is. It's pulse strikes her chest like sonar from his hands beneath the desk. The tips of her fingers tingle and there's the ghost of a marker against her palm, an old and enduring habit. There are vices and virtues, all dancing around her being a stranger again.

"You have one of my letters." She's not going to mince words. She feels ridiculously impulsive, but at the same time, marvelously calm and pushes away from the door. Her stockings stick behind her knees as she walks and her Hogwarts regulation sweater is heavy as she lands gracelessly in the hotseat. She wishes she could take them off, shed them as she is about to shed Hermione Granger as they know her. If he's raising any issue about the letter at all it's because he knows what it does, thus what _she_ can do. What she has done. And if the jig is up, as they say, then she sees no point in continuing to wear that dress.

She feels their curiosity disappear into an odd sense of awareness; it's not that they know or that she knows that they know, but there's a keen understanding of something between them surfacing really for the first time. Mr. Weasely clears his throat and Dumbledore nods. His hands appear, wrinkled and rough, to flatten a piece of lined paper across the table. Subconsciously they lean away. It's powerful, they can feel it. It's not magical, they can feel that too. And it's malevolent. That, she thinks, is probably what they sense most of all.

It's been a long time since she'd last looked at it. The sheet has yellowed some with time, but the blue marker ink is still as vivid as the day she'd scribbled it, furious and half insane.

"Professor Snape informs me that two of the five death eaters to have handled this note, whatever it is since it's discovery during the raid on your home two weeks ago, have since committed suicide."

She's not at all surprised, considering the company that Voldemort keeps. And if she _has_ to get all hippie crap, in touch with her emotional side about it, she's not really sorry either. It's probable that those two death eaters had killed, and would kill again had they never handled her letter. She didn't want to hurt anybody, just resigned herself to the fact that this was war and that she was going to have to.

And this is her okay. She tells her boys that it's nothing and they think that it's madness at its best. (but they admire her attempts to maintain perspective)

"There's.." she begins, then stops because there's what, exactly? Somewhere within herself lies the audacity to laugh. And she does, a short, probably hysterical burst because it's funny, really, just funny how things have culminated to this.

But no. That won't do.

"You should keep it folded. It won't harm anyone in this room, but attempting to look at it when you're not me, or the person it's intended for will bring on one mother of a migraine."

"You know what this is then." She snorts, half amused and half annoyed, crosses one thigh over the other as her eyes roll. They want to believe it isn't hers that she went out one day and a homicidal piece of muggle paper spontaneously generated in a box in her cupboard. It's obtusely optimistic. She hopes the rest of the night won't be this slow.

"It was a month after my tenth birthday. I had a little sister then, who I adored absolutely. Hannah," her voice cracks under the weight of it, "her name was Hannah."

"When I was eight and Hannah was seven an elderly man moved in a couple of streets away. He taught piano, was nice, smiled a lot. Had a room at the front of his house filled with books and games and toys where you could play and wait for your lesson if you had arrived early. It didn't take him long to earn the trust of all the adults in the neighbourhood."

With a flick of her wand the paper begins to unfold. Laying itself face to the desk then folding itself down about an inch and a half from the top. Revealing a long, misspelled word in childish, messy letters.

"He was a pedophile."

Silence.

Mr Weasely is wearing his apologies straight in front of her and she isn't sure if she even wants to touch them. She can't stand the sympathy on their faces, even Snape, she thinks, in the slight curve of his frown. She doesn't want pity. She tells them because she can. Because she's determined that she has long since abandoned the ass end of that time in her life and that she has nothing to be ashamed of. There is nothing there for her now.

"My soft spot was obvious to anyone who bothered to look, and he found it almost immediately. Hannah. He saw how close we were, promised me that if I stayed silent about the things he did to me then he'd leave her alone. In my desperation for her safety I believed him." She laughs, another short, hysterical burst. "I fucking believed him."

Something bubbles deep down inside her, it's familiar and then it isn't. She pushes it down, orders herself to breathe. It had been five years of guilt for what her own stupidity had allowed to happen to her sister, five long years, and she doesn't understand why it won't all just succumb to some sought of plateau. What the _fuck_ happened to time healing all wounds?

But then there's that edge of indifference again, somewhere just outside herself. She remembers that it frightened her once, but grabs it and runs. She refuses to allow them to see her like that. She can feel herself closing off. Pastes herself to distractions and comfort zones.

"Two afternoons a week for two years. Two years I let him do whatever he wanted to me and on my worst days, when the wall between in here", she lays her hand along her breast, "and out here," shakes it out at the world, "was at it's thinnest, when I would _dream_ of impaling him on his own metronome, I would tell myself to suck it up. That it didn't matter. That he could do whatever he wanted to me just as long as he didn't touch _her_."

She steals a breath and the moment is uncomfortable. Almost too much. They shift and she shifts and the feeling matures into a strange taste of irritation under her tongue.

"Until a month after my tenth birthday." She lifts her eyes from the sheet. Meets them head on and steels herself to maintain it.

"I'd read everything in the waiting room five times over by then, but I'd check sometimes for something new.

That's how I found one of his photo albums. Misplaced obviously, anybody could have found it where it had been sitting. Pastel blue with a family of ducks across the front. And filled with pictures of children.

So many. Some I knew, some I didn't, all in various poses and states of undress. I couldn't stop turning the damn pages, you know, like a car crash. You're fascinated and horrified at the same time and you just can't look away. Mostly I was just numb, but I so often was in those days."

She fingers a locket at her throat, inside is a picture of Hannah, then drops her hands. It's how she wears her guilt and she tries not to fiddle, but old habits do like to laugh.

"Until I saw her. Hannah. He'd dressed her in a fairy costume, she loved fairies."

The eternal anger returns then and it's more than just instant, it's _there_. It revolts inside her, up and out, and now she's rambling, she's rambling too fast and there are pieces, fragments that she can sort of rearrange to make sense, but mostly it's all just running from her, gesturing madly, and she hopes, deep down in that small part of herself that still can, that she's saying it right.

"From one second to the next I went from numb to furious. I was befuddled with rage, I couldn't think! I didn't know what to do! So I ran. I was crying and everything was blurred, but I made it home. I used the spare key and stormed inside, through the house room by room. I was in hysterics. I cried, I screamed, I was enraged and I didn't know what to do! I had failed to protect her, the damage had been done. I felt impotent and useless! I couldn't believe I had been so stupid. I hated him!"

Her head spins a little with the memory and she grips the armrests as she runs the symptoms, calling to the rational and the logical to stay calm. Nausea. Loss of appetite. Paranoia. Reclusive behaviour. And go figure, everybody dies.

"Then I was no longer in control. And everything had changed, but was still the same. I had this idea. It was _right there_, in my head. I searched the house for paper and a pen just as quick as I could. I did everything quickly because I didn't want to lose that idea. And I would have, too. I'd loose it the way you eventually lose the dreams you wake with. Right at that moment I had the whole thing in my mind just as clear as day.

Everything grew hot, like I had succumbed to fever, and I lost sound. For I have no idea how long I sat somewhere in my parent's house sweating like it was a hundred degrees and writing like a mad fiend. I wrote words I'd never heard and drew shapes I'd never seen- shapes _nobody_ had ever seen: sankofites and japps and founders and mirks. I wrote and drew until I was dizzy and tired and so thirsty I could have fainted. If my parents had come home I probably wouldn't have noticed. If the next door neighbours dog had broken it's rope, jumped the fence, trotted through the front door and torn off my leg I wouldn't have noticed. I don't think it would have been in my power to notice. I was whacked out of my mind! I mean, Merlin! It was like a river of fire burning right through the middle of my mind! I was delirious!"

They're all about the wide-eyed fascination, Dumbledore in particular and all of a sudden she feels like that poor, damned test monkey from The Andromeda Strain.

"That was the result." She eyes the sheet almost affectionately as it sits untouched on the desk.

"At the end I realised I had to make it stronger, and somehow I knew that the way to do that was to make it just for him. I could have used his name, but I wanted him to know. To read the word 'pedophile' with all it's monstrous, immoral connotations and _know_ that _that_ was what he was. I spelt the word the best that I could, drew a circle around it, then made an arrow at the bottom of the circle pointing to the rest."

"And this personalized it?" McGonegall this time.

"Yes, but only down to a category of people. Using the word pedophile may have been cathartic but it was an error on my part. The letter's not person specific, it will work on anybody who consciously or subconsciously recognises themselves as a pedophile, hence your two dead death eaters."

"When it was finished, perfect, my head was throbbing. The way it does when you've just finished a super hard arithmancy equation, or spent too long reading. I felt like I was going to be sick, but I also felt incredible. The way a painter must feel when they know they've just done their greatest piece. The way a band must feel when they know they've just recorded a hit. I could feel how natural, how right its creation was, right deep down into the depths of myself."

"Before I knew what I was doing, I was watching him carry it inside with his mail from behind a sycamore across the street. Three days later he swallowed two bottles of Panadine Forts with a bottle of Whiskey, sealed a plastic bag over his head, climbed into his bathtub and slit his wrists."

She sighs, rubs her eyes and plants her palms against her thighs. The clock on the wall says something about later and she thinks she might see them sag, if only slightly. Like marionettes cut from their strings.

"So. That's it." Then smiles as a memory comes unbidden. A fat, greying woman swathed in pink. Drifting dishevelled and disorientated through hallways, lashing out at people no one else can see, flinching from noises no one else can hear. She remembers how worn and tired she'd looked at the end, as the Saint Mungoes men walked her through the floo, babbling and pathetic, in the hospital wing.

Her mouth tugs at a smirk and it's Snape that notices, of course it is. There's a "Not entirely" and long, steepled fingers beneath his chin. Four inquisitive faces turn to him like Sun flowers to a black sun.

"Dolores Umbridge was reduced from one of the sharpest minds in the castle to clinically insane in just under a month. What did you suppose could have accomplished such an act?"

She waves, what else exactly is there to say, and three mouths drop while four critical eyebrows rise in recognition.

But people grow their own expectations. Then bury you in them.

Her palms itch under their scrutiny and she hates it. It's a matter of perspective, she thinks. She will not be bullied into guilt.

"You're looking for remorse that has no ETA." She has changed too much. Found herself a moral compass that she can live with despite everything. Watching Dumbledore stroke his beard in thought she can't help but think that he knows this.

"You have killed a man and driven a woman insane." It isn't accusatory so much as statement of fact.

"He had sex with children and she tortured them with dark magic." Because she can simplify the truth to suit her purposes too.

"That is no excuse."

She shrugs, waves them off at the word. "I have stated my reasons, I spoke nothing of excuses."

Silence.

"Indeed."

"This letter writing business, it's triggered by intense emotional distress?" Moody this time, ever on the clock. His voice is gravel driveways.

"It's a safe hypothesis." He 'hmmmm's his acknowledgement into the room, fingers drumming against his thigh. Aurors fingers if ever there were such. In the background Fawks trills from his perch.

A chair creaks and apparently she's missed a huddle, not that it matters. Her cogs and wheels have come to turning and she knows what's coming.

And it's not as though she hasn't thought about it; she is deadly and, so long as the ink and parchment used were entirely unremarkable she was untraceable. It's history, she thinks. The scratch of the sycamore beneath her palm, the marker, the same history she has no interest in falling back into.

But the truth is more like something of an equation. A green-eyed seeker and a red-haired chess genius and the absolute devotion she feels for both of them. Her willingness to do anything that will ensure they are alive come the end.

"So, if given the right stimulus say, memories in a pensieve of an individual performing unspeakable acts. You might be able to produce another of these? Specific to that person?"

"In theory."

She levels a gaze at Dumbledore and smirks.

"But you already knew that."

Outside, the sky has opened.


End file.
